Reconstruction Vol. 13, No. 1
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The Enemy was Waste / Margaret Morganroth Gullette
Keywords: Age; Autobiography; Ageism; Agency; Age identity and Aging; Class; Consumption; Dress Codes; Fashion Cycle; Globalization; Identity Stripping; Progress; Seniority; Socialist Feminism
| 1 |
| My Father’s Thrift |
<1> When I was a child, the unnamed enemy was “waste.” My father went around the house turning off lights when we left a room, or sometimes urged us out of a room where a light could be extinguished. He saved the soap ends and crushed them together for continued use. We children got new clothes rarely, and made old shoes last. You can bet we cleaned our plates—nobody had to remind us about the starving Armenians. My parents were “thrifty”—that was the positive word they used. What they were avoiding—“waste”—that word was heard only, very occasionally, in the adage, “Waste not, want not.” I wonder how many children today hear that saying, in the middle class. But we were not yet middle class; only struggling to become so in the postwar era when it was still possible to rise a quintile or two up the ladder, if you had two incomes, held a union job (as my mother later did), and could save.
<2> Some people turn profligate after such childhoods on the edge. They love spending money, throwing out perfectly good objects to get others that are newer, brighter, shinier, or, if antique, yet rarer, older, costlier. To tell the truth, I went through such a period of obsessive desire, in college and after college. Once I married, I intended slowly to be able to become a bonne bourgeoise: elegant, poised, well-dressed, surrounded by lovely objets, living in my Victorian castle with my handsome, well-dressed, intellectual husband. That started slowly to come true. Insofar as we were able on our small salaries, we bought antiques--a Persian carpet, a seventeenth-century dining table.
<3> But at the same time, the very same time, I was frugal. I liked that word better than “thrifty.” “Thrifty” had an old-fashioned Depression-era sound, the sound of brass, copper and scrap metal tossed clinking into a box for resale, the sound of a crooked nail being hammered straight for reuse, the sound of the arguments my parents had over spending. “Frugal” fit the sixties and seventies better. So I didn’t throw out the objects that I replaced, or that became unusable. I clung to what I had. I regretted what I didn’t—couldn’t—save. If that verb sounds human, that’s close to how I felt. Some stuff, at least, the self of yesteryear preserved. In particular, she had a bottom drawer that was full of old clothes and fabrics.
| 2 |
| What Exactly Lay in State in the Bottom Drawer? |
<4> Why did I save them? The answer seems simple. They were beautiful in themselves, and I had fallen in love with them once. The little black dress from freshman dances in college, with the 35 tiny round cloth-covered buttons that had to be fastened one by one. The green silk print that Monsieur Trigère had given me the summer when I was the seventeen-year-old governess of his ten-year-old daughter on Fifth Avenue. Some clothes I could no longer wear because my shape changed a little after childbearing. Some fragments from upholstery or curtain remants—pale pink cut velvet, beige linen in a tree-of-life pattern. The pieces carried a high esthetic value: they were sensuously touchable, and they were redolent with my past. Way too good to throw away. No, I didn’t intend to reuse them—I don’t sew; but still, I couldn’t see tossing them into the garbage for landfill.
| 3 |
| My Father’s Dress Code |
<5> Writing this today, I find I have to rewrite my relations to my parents, as I go back to my childhood with clearer hindsight. My mother owned bulging clothes closets, had taken me clothes-shopping frequently, from the age of six on, and continued to pay for almost all my clothes even after I married. Because of that, I continued to think that what I was saving from scrap in adulthood was her influence--her involvement in my relatively chic appearance, her deep knowledge of designers, her love of craft-work, her role in constructing all those desires. She was the loving, generous, and dominant figure of my childhood, my adolescence, my college years, the post-college years.
<6> Now, however, thinking through the metaphor and harsh realities of “waste,” I see my father’s role looming larger. A fragment of cobalt silk velvet too small to use could be considered my female version of his box of bent-and-straightened nails. My father wore khaki pants and workshirts—in winter over his long-johns, with wool plaid shirts layered one over the other. He had a muscular build; broad, strong, work-toughened hands. In a basement shop, he had fashioned stilts for us as kids and taught me to hammer and nail and to box. The jar of old brass and copper was kept there on the bench. He worked long hours, first as a beverage-delivery man with his own truck, later parking cars in his own lot near the Church Avenue subway station.
<7> I was aware that his radical egalitarianism, his dislike for shopping and his disdain for bourgeois dress codes, were considered anomalous in our extended family. He seemed to lag behind the other men, who by the 1950s were dressing in suits or jackets with ties for family parties. He never wore a tie even to a restaurant on holidays. He wore clean, well-ironed shirts that buttoned to the top. My mother didn’t like it. It was a bone of contention. He looked good, I thought as a kid. He looked contented in his clothes. But I also thought he should wear what my mother said, to avoid arguments.
<8> His was a “Depression-mentality,” some would say. The Thirties had taught the terror of deprivation, and brought it close enough to our family’s working class to be a real terror. Others might say he wanted—or wouldn’t avoid—the conflict with my mother. He had principles—a basic ideological way of being, allied to his left politics and values and his working-class loyalties. He expressed them in conversation and practiced them in dress. So important is practice that in our tight-knit family this set him apart, in a way that confused me. His mode of appearing on social occasions was both respected (by those who shared his politics, and most did) and humorous (because the rest chose to leave the proletarian look behind). My father didn’t like the contradictions, I suppose; he certainly was not going to live them. He was resisting the “progress” of his siblings out of Brooklyn and north on to suburban markers. He was resisting my mother’s new upscale look, she in her Claire McArdles and Bonnie Cashins. He never articulated this; he didn’t have to. In our nuclear family system, from my naive place at the table, my father could be said to have represented the opposite of fancy fabrics, fashionable clothing, that particular type of esthetic bliss, combined as it was with the urgent desire for elegant upward mobility.
<9> The first benefit of being asked to contemplate “How Did I Write That?,” is that it inspired me to go back to my bottom drawer rather than, say, to the early drives to Loehmann’s with my mother. Both my parents fed into my collection. But I see more clearly now that, in regard to my instinct for permanent possessions, my obsession with letting nothing go to waste, my father was far more important. He wasn’t “behind” the family; he was apart, or even ahead. With this discovery, I have rescued my father from a diminution that the gender binary and class stereotypes in the family encouraged in me back then.
<10> There was another reason why I didn’t give him enough importance then, that had to do with the period in which I was writing the essay. (We always want to look at the historical circumstances of creative production.) It was smack in the middle of the Nineties, during the flagrant consumption behavior of the dot.com bubble, when the term “early adapter” was like “right hand of God.”[1] Young people, the desirable demographic, adapted and bought the new, fast. People who didn’t get with the program—another dismissive idiom—were anachronistic, vieux jeu, set in their ways. Old. Although the end of the Cold War could have ended the fear of socialism, left politics was actually set back. Hasn’t capitalism won decisively, folks? Get with the program. I had unrecognized cultural and political pressure as well as unanalyzed psychological reasons for not recognizing how important my father’s stance--and my father--were to me.
<11> Now I would be happy if he became a symbol—if I were ever to write my political age-autobiography—for this whole saving side of life. For the side of socialism that craves more equal distribution of all the valued goods of life.
<12> But I reserved that bottom drawer long ago, before I really knew what I was doing. Maybe my unconscious was resisting, as I added faultless discards and precious fragments to my collection. But as for that youthful self: for years, she was merely hoarding.
| 4 |
| Practicing Loss |
<13> That bottom drawer turns up in a chapter called “The Other End of the Fashion Cycle: Practicing Loss, Learning Decline” in my book Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife, published in 1997. I am an age critic [a term I often use in preference to "cultural critic of age"), and that was my first book that moved into age theory. That is the text Reconstruction hs led me to reconsider.
<14> The chapter has gotten more attention than many other pieces I have published. (The book won the Emily Toth Prize as the best feminist book on American popular culture.[2]) The essay was republished in a slightly different version in Kathleen Woodward’s edited collection Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations (1999). Adrienne Munich, a feminist theorist at Stony Brook, taught the essay and cites it in her Fashion in Film (2011). Cynthia Port, the co-editor of Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal, homed in on the main point. She writes (2011-2012), “In one powerful essay, Gullette argues that the fashion system teaches us to detach ourselves from and then discard clothes and other no-longer-fashionable commodities as a means of training ourselves for our own obsolescence in old age.”[3]
<15> It had always been mysterious to me how I arrived at that central concept: which is that we as cultural critics and all of us as consumers should not dwell on the “point of purchase” of a material object, where desire is constructed—the thrilling, edgy, sexy moment that everyone is supposed to focus on, or how could commercial life proceed? Now I believe that my father pointed me away from that moment, by not desiring, and by not wasting; and by having good and sufficient reasons for not participating in the fashion system. Even when merely hoarding, I was imitating him. He was, dear man, a one-point example of the cultural alternative, out of which resistance may grow.
<16> One of our necessary roles as cultural critics is to look beyond commerce and its allures. There is a fine left-wing or/and feminist tradition that critiques advertizing brilliantly. Sometimes it urges women to participate less in buying and focusing on fashion. As consumerism exuberantly exploded in the United States in the Reagan Eighties and the tech-bubble Nineties, and even the credit-card debacle of the oughts, that counsel of detachment seemed wise but ineffective. Boycotting might—and should—become more attractive, with globalization added as a fierce deterrent. (Since I occasionally like some new styles, how I personally deal with the conundrum of buying clothes now, when most are made in maquiladoras and Chinese slave factories, is an issue. Among other things, I support the Sweatfree Consortium. http://buysweatfree.org) To that urging of socialist feminism I felt I could add other, deeper reasonings. I saw a link between fashion-consumption and aging.[4]
<17> I came to this link by being curious about the widely accepted and universally ignored practice of discarding. The other end of the fashion cycle. In our affluent society, we all practice the discard without thinking much about it, certainly without grieving for every lost garment and the past self (its comfort, loyalty, esthetic pleasure, events, etc.) associated with it. The toss goes on all our lives, incrementally and invisibly. Because clothes have become cheaper, throwing them away happens more often now than in the earlier postwar period—too often to focus consciously on subterranean sorrow. So, under the guise and commands of fashion, you can practice losing-as-a-fate and not even know it.
<18> In the 1990s, I was excited by recent writings about practice, which distinguished what we do from what we think or say or feel. The theorists were saying that practice was more important; it was the way learning took. Anything about learning fed into the social-construction-of-everything hypothesis that I was pounding away at, on my own turf of age studies. Judith Butler was explaining in Gender Trouble (1990) and, Bodies That Matter (1993) that something mostly considered “natural”—gender—was constructed by repetitive practices, emerging as recognizable from the performances. She was interested in “temporality” because repetition requires it, but temporality as philosophers discuss it almost never touches aging. Some of the writers in Cultural Studies (the mind-expanding Grossberg-Treichler-Nelson compendium of 1992) were looking at all sorts of under-described practices: what people hung on their walls, the concerts they attended, the gay Star-Trek fiction they invented
<19> These critics too were unconcerned with aging. I was used to that. Cultural studies and American studies, along with other fields involved in intersectionality, still need to be invited to integrate age.[5] My method was to try to take bright shiny theory that ignored age and aging and make it work for age studies. The book I published in 2004 would be called Aged by Culture. “What does age have to do with it?” Those were fruitful questions if asked persistently.
| 5 |
| Learning Decline |
<20> Can you practice aging, and in what ways? Sometimes the questions I ask myself sound preposterous—even to me, initially, and to those who think aging is something that happens only in the chromosomes or the genes. Not dangerous, but silly. But one goal of age studies as I define it is to push “the natural” out of context after context, and replace it with culture in a plausible way. Of course practices come with feelings, complex feelings. In this case, the question came from looking quizzically at people throwing away clothes they had once wanted enough to lay out good money for them. “How does wasting work on us psychically, inside?” I didn’t know this was the implicit question I was asking myself. . . but, well, trust the unconscious even in writing nonfiction. The unconscious, somehow concerned with unconsciousness.
<21> Clothes have a “life cycle”—from the stress and relief of purchasing, through the public display of possession (with its associated eventfulness), to the decline of interest (going out of fashion) and the avoidance (ridding our space of the unwanted object) that is necessary to start the cycle again. In “The Other End of the Fashion Cycle” I suggested that discarding is a repetitive process through which (in our culture of abundance and longevity and the cult of youth, beauty, sex, and fashion), people learn over time to think of aging, and of old age, and of course also their own bodily aging and old age, as the appropriate time for discard. The practice of throwing clothes away, over and over again, life-long, is a way of imaging, and feeling, aging as a decline.
<22> If we live long enough, we move, personally, in our bodies, from being the baby cynosure, the new, the prized, the desired, the unblemished, to becoming, increasingly, over time, (at different ages, given the multiple bad intersections possible in an unequal and biased society)—the rejecta membra. We may be loved in our families and treated well within our little circles, but in some recess of ourselves, as we age beyond youth and then beyond the middle years, we are being prepared, and preparing ourselves, to become scrap. Most of us unquestionably gain richer identities, and more identities, as we age past youth. I don’t need to belabor this pro-aging point here. But ageism causes us to doubt the value of this selfhood and feel that it is vanishing bit by bit. I call the process identity-stripping.
| 6 |
| Mysteries of Internalization |
<23> Looking at practices may help solve a problem I observe in psychology: how and at what ages people turn ageism inward, on ourselves? We know ageism is widespread and that children in our culture begin to learn it young. Scholars believe that by age five, American children begin to develop some negative attitudes toward “older” adults and by age eight they have ‘‘well defined negative notions’’about older adults and old age. School children—even those who have grandparents—have images and language that include “weird,” “stingy,” “vulnerable.” In a Michigan study, the two pupils with the most negative views answered, "Growing old makes me scared of being sick" and "When I grow old, I don't want to be in an old folks' home. I want to be independent."[6]
<24> Researchers also notice that children seldom imagine that they themselves will suffer from such conditions when they grow old. Fifty-five percent of the middle school children in San Antonio Texas, in a large study by Michael J. Lichtenstein and his colleagues, believe they will be healthy, active, and engaged in activities. A number of children envision themselves as being grandparents (17.2%), having a house or acquiring possessions (13.3%), and having a positive state of mind (11.3%).[7] Do processes occur that turn some children who placidly expect to be old and nice and contented, into young adults who are truly averse to old people? Certainly some write ugly stuff on the Internet. Yale researchers, led by Prof. Becca Levy, found so much on Facebook they concluded that social media is a platform for what I would call hate speech. Another study found someone speaking from within his youth cohort as if for his cohort, writing, “God forbid these miserable once-were-people not survive as long as possible to burden the rest of us.”[8] There can scarcely be a more vicious dehumanization of Others than to wish them dead. Ageism can be as outrageously vituperative as racism and sexism.
<25> At some point, adults begin to internalize their own decline. “OMG, this is about me!” (Their anticipations are often wrong. 57% of people under 64 expect to suffer memory loss, for example, while only 25% over 65 report experiencing it– one “sizable gap” between negative expectations and actual experiences, according to a Pew Research Center report.[9])
<26> The usual explanation of this drastic alteration in selfhood is the relentless continuing education that decline ideology provides: children’s classics featuring witches, cartoons, SNL, the virtual obliteration of older people in visual culture like ads and TV roles and films except in various stereotyped ways. The media and Republicans describe old people as a “burden”; mainstream media feature articles about the duty-to-die, and how to go cheaply. As I write, the President, having defended Social Security verbally, agrees to cut the cost-of-living adjustment that prevents people from becoming ever poorer as they age. [10] Not coincidentally, a teacher sets a debate topic for students: “Why are old people a burden not only to the family but also society?”[11] Ageism is growing worse, I argue; the subtitle of my latest book is Fighting the New Ageism in America.
<27> Yet not everyone reads the latest Atlantic or New York Times’ features, Elle or Vogue, watches movies intended for 18-35 year-olds, follows nasty public-policy debates about Social Security and Medicare. Do these self-exempted people nevertheless internalize ageism? Almost certainly, but how? Despite important feminist] work going back to Simone de Beauvoir and up to the latest economists of the “woman-cession”, and sexist "evolutionary" theories about why men want younger women, etcetera, there are still puzzles about why women seem to internalize ageism younger and more painfully than men. But women do discard more readily and more often than men–-since men are allowed to keep clothes longer and women buy more often. And certainly old people who say “I’m not old”—which Molly Andrews calls “a desperate plea for personal exceptionalism which challenges, not the ageist stereotype, but rather its application to themselves”—feel some degree of self-hatred at the same time.[12]
<28> The age at which internalization begins is another issue. In the Age of Longevity, unfortunately, it starts earlier in life than it used to--long before age sixty-five. The economics of the life course is another place to look for a growing pattern of people being discarded because of being “too old.” Middle ageism is a set of discourses and practices and feelings that I have written since Declining to Decline (1997) Threats of midlife job loss, language about “Old-Timers disease” and “deadwood,” and actual midlife job discrimination, on top of insecurity and stagnant wages, make people who are older-than-young feel like waste-in-waiting.[13] In the job market, women are treated as older earlier. They sue for job discrimination ten years earlier than men.
<29> My hypothesis about discarding seeks to fill some of the gaps in theory--in a context of mounting evidence of the growing sexist ageism of culture, of course. It should be liberating in the long run to approach people-aging-over- the- life-course as formed in some way by their own unthinking repetitive acts, rather than being mere receptacles of ageist propaganda, retaining the toxic curriculum because they imbibe little doses daily. Emphasizing practices does not mean we are free of the influences; only that we are coerced more subtly than we might have thought. Where agency exists, however, resistance may emerge.
| 7 |
| It’s Still a Strange Idea |
<30> This process of discarding is an example of a kind of emotional/ cultural development in relation to ageism, occurring in particular places in a particular historical period. There seems a great deal more to discover about the intersections and the processes of internalization. How big a role discarding plays in individuals or groups or classes is conjectural. It may differ. It may more deeply injure rich women, or women who buy new clothes more often, and thus discard more frequently and unthinkingly.
<31> It didn’t, however, as far as I can tell, injure my mother. She lived long enough to become a doughty anti-ageist, figure in my books, encourage me to write them, and write anti-ageist letters to the editor of the Miami Herald. She had always been a progressive—pro-union, pro-integration, pro-woman. She turned her own aging into resistance and she continued to buy beautiful clothes deep into her nineties with a tranquil mind. She never read “The Other End of the Fashion Cycle” past the section about her taking me to Loehmann's, and I never explained its thesis. On the other hand, we discussed anti-ageism enthusiastically. And she never threw anything away: she had six closets full of clothes. And my father eventually, in his sixties, wore one or two beautiful silk-wool jackets that my mother bought for him; and even, at weddings, a tie. He died at 69, prematurely, but I don’t think he had internalized ageism either. Perhaps applying his egalitarian politics--everyone is equal to everyone else--to himself may have saved him from thinking he was less than he had been simply by being older. In any case, he was happier retired, finally out of the capitalist workforce.
<32> For some readers, my hypothesis has power. I daresay it is testable through introspection. It may seem a plausible insight into how culture works on selfhood. I hope people will want to write more about it. It may not be testable by psychologists or sociologists, although therapists of a certain kind might probe for it. Humanists, cultural critics, social philosophers, and of course people who write about the history of the emotions, can entertain it.
<33> I, who have reworked many concepts, had never tinkered with this one until today. I used to think of it, privately, marveling, as the one instance where my work had come close to genius. “Genius”—pace Oscar Wilde—means not taking pains, having an original idea simply come to you. (Of course one can’t say that openly. One always is pushed to talk about one’s intellectual gurus–one’s Foucault, one's Sandra Lee Bartky, one’s Stuart Hall.)
<34> In any case, now I know how much of the bottom drawer, and the hypothesis, and the feelings I wrote it from, came from my father. (I wish I had known enough to say so, in relation to “The Other End of the Fashion Cycle,” when asked to write about my intellectual development in a volume in which “First-Generation Critics” were requested to “Reflect on Age, Aging and the Making of Critical Gerontology.”) In any case, I have relinquished the quiet tiny internal “originality” label. My father was my model. He appeared in the original chapter, but not this way. Discovering all this about him—the soundness of his value system, the example he gave of innate resistance to fashion--the relevance of all of this today—brings him alive in new ways. This is a big gift Reconstruction has given me.
<35> And I came to an even more expansive definition of “fashion,” a larger and breath-giving sense of it as a practice and an ideology that ignores history, devalues life-course wisdom, undermines the traditions of progressive politics, and in so doing, creates ever more waste.
| 8 |
| When Progress Ends |
<36> The longer you live, the more terrible waste looms: bombed cities disfigured by wreckage; children staring over their big bellies, starving, while the 1% buy their fourth home; peasant-farmers denied water, while behind their walls the rich swim in their pools. The garbage dumps overflowing with usable materials; the dumpster-divers who make a living out of scavenging. Recycling is one answer to the postmodern glut and carelessness. One report, by GAIA, a consortium of grassroots groups, NGOs, and individuals in over 90 countries, is called “On The Road To Zero Waste.”[14] Even “First-World” people are learning to shut off lights and lower the thermostat, for sustainability and thrift combined. A horror of waste and deprivation drives good development and progressive politics.
<37> But the greatest waste may be undermining the value of long lives, into which so much love and care, learning and experience, has been expended.
<38> Think of the care it takes to raise a child to a healthy independence—not one careless minute when she might have fallen into the sea, run under a car, cut herself through self-deprecation. Meanwhile, the child is also being educated, possibly praised, planned for. Children are mostly told a trustful progress story about how the life course will get better. In protected circumstances, children absorb into their age identity some elements of personal progress: an increasing sense of control over material things, authority over themselves, tenderness toward juniors. The children I quoted who think they will be active grandparents, owning houses, had absorbed the message of progress over the life course. They will get bigger, smarter, become an earner. Trust, wait, work hard. Their children will look up to them; they will listen they way they as children now listen to their parents.
<39> We think less—we aren’t asked to think as much—about the value continuously added to a long life, unless we write our own age auto/biography and are looking specifically for the story of the richness we benefitted from. Once we are beyond youth, aging well depends a lot on material conditions, and the values that ride with them. If we live long, longevity itself is almost certainly the outcome of access to lifelong medical, dental, and nursing care. We become the repository of mentoring, kindness, and economic structures that repay loyalty. A “career” means–or used to mean—starting out young with an entry-level wage and having one’s wages rise with experience and time. This whole system is what I call “seniority.” It is not just our individual merits but the existence of a system of age-graded benefits that enables many of us to climb the ladder of income–up to a point—as we climb the ladder of years.
<40> A “career” means–or used to mean—starting out young with an entry-level wage and having one’s wages rise with experience and time. This whole system is what I call “seniority.” It is not just our individual merits but the existence of a system of age-graded benefits that enables many of us to climb the ladder of income–up to a point—as we climb the ladder of years.
<41> The whole honor of the life course—increasing respect for increasing age—depends on a modest degree of this kind of seniority. We need not only rising wages, but second chances and respectful age hierarchies to do well all along life’s journey, and add value to the longevity that more of us are going to experience. Pensions and Social Security are made possible by another concept tied to seniority: having earned and contributed, a person should be protected after retirement and through old age. Seniority makes it possible to look forward without terror to aging beyond youth. Seniority, broadly understood, is the basis of aging well over the life course. If carelessness wastes, solidarity saves. Concern saves. Love and social justice, via public policy, save.
<42> “Progress” as I define it refers to expectations about the life course, hopes about aging well, and political systems that support this possibility. Since any use of “progress” gets irritably queried in some circles, let me say this: My understanding of life course needs and potentials has nothing to do with Whig history, with utopianism, with faith that things get better by themselves. All we get, in an ageist system, is what we can successfully fight for.
<43> This seniority system of the life course is what our capitalist economy and thoughtless consumerist society are destroying. “For researchers in age studies, attending to the implications of temporal ideologies can help us better interpret the cultural resonances attached to the aging process and the significance of developments in cultural forms,” writes Cynthia Port, quoting Agewise.[15] In the frenzied national effort to uncap charter schools and end union-won prerogatives for public employees and the building trades, to weaken federal unions, no one—not even the unions—has revealed the underlying philosophical and economic issue that concerns all of us. Weakening seniority, as our system has been doing for over thirty years, accompanies growing inequality. The loss of seniority has consequences that are dire for most citizens, whatever their political position.
<44> Ageism in some of its many forms blinds younger people to the literal existence or subjective necessities or intrinsic value of people they consider “old.” Ageism has been altering the life course so gravely, even in the middle years, that it changes what Americans think of as the human. Some people who are frail or memory-impaired—living in “the fourth age,” as is sometimes cruelly said in gerontology—are represented as no longer quite human. Without seniority, the American Dream vanishes like vapor. Without a seniority system that leads people comfortably enough on to Medicare and Social Security, longevity is just a mean medical joke.
<45> The enemy is still, and always, waste.
Endnotes
[1] Instead of making my father the key symbol, I see that I doubled his position, which included “satisfaction” with what he had. I did so by showcasing a character from a Thirties’ novel, a submissive wife, who objects to her husband’s acquisitive upward mobility (“Why not be satisfied?” she asks plaintively), because of what she loses thereby. But she cannot resist him.
[2] Declining to Decline was reviewed in the New York Times when the Times still had space and an audience for some cross-over nonfiction: Manning, “Midlife Support.”
[3] Port, “No Future?”
[4] The chapter turns around the problems of internalization and resistance, in several ways. It needed to be, as it is, a collage--of auto/biography; literary, social and economic history; social philosophy; and age theory.
I also turned the fashion/aging discussion toward men. The fact that men were being aged by culture–made to objectify themselves as bodies as they aged past youth, look critically in mirrors, participate in fashion, and resort to anti-aging products like Viagra, was another theme of Declining to Decline, in Part Three, “Men: All Together Now?”
[5] A recent invitation comes in the issue on age studies of the prestigious American Studies/Amerikastudien (56 #1, 2011), edited by Rüdiger Kunow and Heike Hartung. The first sentence of Kunow’s essay in the volume begins, “In this paper I would like to solicit interest among the American studies community for ‘age’. . .”; the section is titled “The Coming of ‘Old Age’–to American Studies.” (“Chronologically Gifted?” 23) The journal is produced by the German Association for American Studies.
[6] Aday et al, “Changing Children's Perceptions,” citing Corbin, Kagan, & Metil-Corbin, 1987: 38. One way to study ageism in children is to look at attitudes on the pre-tests they take before they go into anti-ageist intergenerational programs, and then at the questions they answer afterward about how they used to feel. This is my focus here.
[7] Lichtenstein, “Sentence Completion,” 839.
[8] From a poster at GSA in 2011: Stripling, A et al, “College Students’ Perceptions.”
[9] Pew Research Center, “Growing Old in America.”
[10] On the duty to die, see Agewise; also, most recently, Gullette, “Margaret Morganroth Gullette.”
[11] Found at http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080419195953AAmHhvM Accessed October 23, 2012. As Stripling et al show, many students reject ageism but are unable to make arguments against it.
[12] Andrews, “The seductiveness of agelessness,” 306.
[13] Chapters in Declining to Decline, Aged by Culture, and Agewise deal with middle ageism.
[14] GAIA (Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives) is the alliance.
[15] Port,“No Future?
References
Aday, Ronald H., Kathryn L. Aday , Josephine L. Arnold, and Susan L. Bendix. “Changing Children's Perceptions of the Elderly: The Effects of Intergenerational Contact, Gerontology & Geriatrics Education 16 #3 (1996): 37-51
Andrews, Molly. “The Seductiveness of Agelessness,” Ageing and Society 19 #3 (May 1999,: 301-318.
Grossberg, Larry, Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler, eds. Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. “Margaret Morganroth Gullette on the vote for physician-assisted dying,” October 22, 2012
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